A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  2012 In an attempt to create a paper trail for his own imagination, Philip Roth on this day published an “Open Letter to Wikipedia” on The New Yorker’s website to establish, for the record, that he had not based the character Coleman Silk in his novel The Human Stain on the writer Anatole Broyard, who, like Silk, hid his black ancestry to identify as white. Having been told by a Wikipedia administrator that “we require secondary sources” when he tried to edit speculation about Broyard from the Human Stain entry, Roth wrote the source material himself, testifying that his story was inspired instead by his friend Melvin Tumin, a professor hounded, like Silk, for an innocuous use of the word “spooks,” and listing in great detail many of the elements of his story that came from no specific source outside his own capacity for invention.

  September 8

  BORN: 1924 Grace Metalious (Peyton Place, The Tight White Collar), Manchester, N.H.

  1947 Ann Beattie (Chilly Scenes of Winter, Distortions), Washington, D.C.

  1954 Jon Scieszka (The Stinky Cheese Man, Math Curse), Flint, Mich.

  DIED: 1995 Eileen Chang (Lust, Caution; Love in a Fallen City), 74, Los Angeles

  1666 Samuel Pepys bought two eels near the Thames, spent much of the day talking with people whose homes had been spared or destroyed by the great London fire of the previous week, and then traveled out of the city to retrieve his diary, which he had taken out of harm’s way during the conflagration (other valuables—his wine and Parmesan cheese—he had buried in a hole in his yard). The account he then recorded of the calamity—the Lord Mayor wailing at his inability to halt the fire’s advance, pigeons hovering by their burning homes for so long their wings were singed—remains the most valuable record of the fire, and though Pepys’s normal life resumed (he was soon visiting his mistresses again) for months he dreamed uneasily of flames.

  1883 “You are quite right, little princess,” Sigmund Freud wrote to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, about the book they were both reading, Don Quixote, “it is no reading matter for girls, I had quite forgotten the many coarse and in themselves nauseating passages when I sent it to you.” But the book made him split his sides with laughter anyway, and he kept writing to her about it, insisting on this day, “Do finish Don Quixote; the second part contains many fewer of the shocking qualities than the first and is far more fantastic.”

  1968 “It must have cost at least two hundred thousand dollars to produce this scene”: Arthur Ashe serving to Clark Graebner in the semifinals of the U.S. Open at Forest Hills. A few years after launching his career by profiling Bill Bradley at Princeton, John McPhee returned to sports with Levels of the Game, a double portrait of two American tennis stars—Ashe becoming a legend, Graebner at the peak of his short career—and the training and talent that brought them to center court. Born the same year and opponents and friends for much of their lives, they were opposites on the court and off, which they acknowledged as readily as anyone: black and white, liberal and conservative, artistic and businesslike, free-swinging and stiff, cool and anxious. McPhee’s portrait was based on those opposites but subtly complicated by the precision of each profile and by the players’ own thoughtful senses of who and where they were.

  2002 Judith Shulevitz, in the New York Times, on Christopher Hitchens’s Why Orwell Matters: “As Hitchens and just about every other political columnist knows, quoting Orwell is like quoting Scripture. You can find support for almost any argument if you leaf through his collected writings long enough, because he wrote about nearly everything that mattered and was never afraid to change his mind when circumstances proved some earlier assumption incorrect.”

  September 9

  BORN: 1868 Mary Austin (The Land of Little Rain, The Ford), Carlinville, Ill.

  1964 Aleksandar Hemon (Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project), Sarajevo

  DIED: 1898 Stéphane Mallarmé (The Afternoon of a Faun), 56, Valvins, France

  1980 John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me, Scattered Shadows), 60, Fort Worth, Tex.

  1876 The Spectator on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda: “No book of hers before this ever contained so little humour . . . On the other hand, . . . no book of hers was ever conceived on ideal lines so noble.”

  1907 “I may say,” Alice B. Toklas was made to say by Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken.” Pablo Picasso and Alfred North Whitehead were two of the geniuses; the third she met when she arrived in Paris from San Francisco, not long after the earthquake everyone in Paris was eager to hear about, and called on her friends Michael and Sarah Stein. There with them was Michael’s younger sister Gertrude, “a golden brown presence” in a “warm brown corduroy suit,” as Alice recalled in her actual autobiography, with a voice “deep, full, velvety like a great contralto’s, like two voices.” Much later, with her two voices, she’d speak for Alice in the book that, finally, made them both famous.

  1944 Sergeant J. D. Salinger’s eleven months of combat in Europe, which began when he waded through the surf at Utah Beach on D-Day, were almost unrelentingly grim: in June alone two-thirds of his infantry regiment were killed or wounded. But on this day he wrote a letter home that was filled with joy. Not only was his regiment among the first to enter liberated Paris, he told Whit Burnett, his editor at Story, but he had met Hemingway. After word got out that the great writer was at the Ritz, Salinger drove there in his jeep and showed Hemingway one of his own war stories in a recent Saturday Evening Post. Hemingway praised the story, said he had already seen Salinger’s picture in Esquire, and was “not big-shotty” at all to the writer twenty years his junior. The two remained in touch through the war, though the often-told story that Hemingway later visited Salinger’s unit and shot the head off a chicken may not be true.

  1958 Ralph Ellison reported back to Albert Murray on the Columbia Records concert later released as Miles Davis and Duke Ellington’s Jazz at the Plaza records, “Duke signified on Davis all through his numbers and his trumpeters and saxophonists went after him like a bunch of hustlers in a Georgia skin game fighting with razors.”

  1975 After their second declaration of bankruptcy, Raymond and Maryann Carver were released from $24,390 in debts.

  September 10

  BORN: 1935 Mary Oliver (American Primitive, Thirst), Maple Heights, Ohio

  1937 Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse), Boston

  DIED: 1976 Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun, Eclipse), 70, Los Angeles

  1994 Amy Clampitt (The Kingfisher, What the Light Was Like), 74, Lenox, Mass.

  1797 In late March, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two political radicals in the age of revolution, having first met at the home of Tom Paine, were joined in marriage, a custom they had each become notorious for condemning. Five months later, Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter, whom they hoped to raise with the same independence they had brought to their marriage, but the mother quickly took ill after an infection, and on this day, after eleven days tenderly described by Godwin in the Memoirs of his wife (a book whose frankness would soon make him a pariah), she died. The baby girl, who survived, was named Mary like her mother, and two decades later, under her married name of Mary Shelley, she wrote Frankenstein.

  1967 Djuna Barnes, author of the avant-garde landmarks Nightwood and Ryder, spent the last forty-two years of her life as “the most famous unknown in the world!” as she wrote to a friend on this day. From her tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, she guarded her legacy and her privacy with a ferocity that led one acquaintance to refer to her as “Madame Vitriol,” refusing visits from some admirers, like Carson McCullers and Anaïs Nin, but not others: after Susan Sontag sent her a copy of Against Interpretation, Barnes wrote her, “I have been informed that seeing me on the village streets, you have refrained from addressing me, because someone has told you that I am a Demon, of some violence and invective. Please do me the pleasure of speaking with me the next time?”


  NO YEAR Something was going on in the neglected building known as Old Meats, the chairman of the horticulture department noticed. The building, right in the middle of campus, had been locked up for years, but he saw a nondescript young man let himself in and out. What was going on in Old Meats, it turned out, was Earl Butz, a pearly white, eighteen-month-old, third-of-a-ton Landrace hog, and a secret experiment in porcine nutrition: what would happen if a pig, bred for the task, was encouraged to eat as much as he could for as long as he could? After transplanting Shakespearean tragedy to a midwestern hog farm in her Pulitzer-winning A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley stayed in her adopted Iowa but turned to comedy in Moo, a land-grant-college novel with a cast of hundreds, at whose center sits Earl Butz, a massive metaphor as well as a living, feeling beast who knows to make a break for it when he can.

  September 11

  BORN: 1885 D. H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow), Eastwood, England

  1959 Andre Dubus III (The House of Sand and Fog, Townie), Oceanside, Calif.

  DIED: 1958 Robert W. Service (“The Cremation of Sam McGee”), 84, Lancieux, France

  2009 Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries, Forced Entries), 60, New York City

  1599 Swiss tourist Thomas Platter’s mention of attending Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar makes it the first recorded performance at the new Globe Theatre.

  1888 “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress,” Anton Chekhov wrote to A. S. Souvorin. “When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it’s disorderly, it’s not so dull, and besides, neither of them loses anything from my infidelity.”

  1979 At the center of Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer is a note of seduction so brazen it was nearly its author’s undoing: a letter from reporter Joe McGinniss to Jeffrey MacDonald, who had just been convicted of the murder of his family, assuring him that “total strangers can recognize within five minutes that you did not receive a fair trial . . . It’s a hell of a thing—spend the summer making a new friend and then the bastards come along and lock him up. But not for long, Jeffrey—not for long.” But as McGinniss later made clear in his book on MacDonald, Fatal Vision, he was convinced even then of his subject’s guilt. MacDonald sued McGinniss (they settled out of court), and Malcolm, herself recently sued by one of her own subjects, used their case to argue that no journalist can avoid the role of a seducer who carries an “unholy power” over those she writes about.

  1992 Lorna Sage, in the TLS, on Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient: “With Ondaatje, togetherness is a momentary, present-tense phenomenon: as soon as people start developing pasts and futures, everything becomes fissile and flies apart.”

  2001 On the final afternoon of his (and his guide Sergei’s) thirty-seven-day, 9,000-mile trip across Siberia by van and train, the longest of the five he took for his Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier arrived at a Pacific beach of boulders, broken cement, and rusted iron, with a small black cow standing nearby, two wrecked ships in the bay, and a large rock spray-painted with the logos of the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers. Not until the next morning did he talk to his wife at home in New Jersey and learn of the events in Manhattan that day.

  2001 That same evening, at the other end of Manhattan from the attacks, Alice Stewart Trillin, the addressee of the title imperative in her husband Calvin’s Alice, Let’s Eat and a level-headed presence in many of his other books—and, as he described her later in About Alice, an “incorrigible and ridiculous optimist”—died at New York Presbyterian Hospital of heart failure, caused by her radiation treatment for lung cancer twenty-five years before.

  September 12

  BORN: 1880 H. L. Mencken (The American Language, Prejudices), Baltimore

  1943 Michael Ondaatje (Coming Through Slaughter), Colombo, Ceylon

  DIED: 1869 Peter Mark Roget (Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases), 90, West Malvern, England

  2008 David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster), 46, Claremont, Calif.

  1560 It’s an irresistible story: on this day Arnaud du Tilh was sentenced to death for impersonating Martin Guerre, a well-to-do peasant who had abandoned his wife and son only to return a dozen years later to find that du Tilh, claiming to be Guerre, had taken his place and fathered two sons with Guerre’s wife. Ever since, this tale of bold imposture has drawn storytellers, from Michel de Montaigne, who may have been at du Tilh’s sentencing, to local villagers who passed down the story for centuries, and finally to two slim, evocative retellings in the twentieth century: Janet Lewis’s 1941 novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, and Natalie Zemon Davis’s historical investigation, The Return of Martin Guerre, written after she consulted on the Gérard Depardieu movie of the same name.

  1867 The charges for the inquest into the death of eighteen-year-old Malcolm Melville, son of Herman, whose death by pistol was ruled a suicide “while laboring under temporary insanity of mind,” totaled $11.31¼.

  1895 George Bernard Shaw crashed his bicycle into Bertrand Russell, whose “knickerbockers were demolished.”

  1925 By eleven in the evening only a few of the guests remain at the Stoners’ first party in their new, too-expensive house: the assistant dean and his wife, some friends from the English department, and, unexpectedly, Hollis Lomax, who has, in his year in the department, remained an opaque, ironic presence, declining all social invitations until this one. Well into the early hours of the next day, Lomax speaks openly as never before, confessing his personal struggles, and by the night’s late end, just before Lomax gives Stoner’s wife a chaste yet oddly intimate goodbye kiss, Stoner feels a kinship with this man who had been a stranger. The feeling lasts until the following Monday, when Lenox greets Stoner with an inexplicable iciness closer to anger than irony, the first sign of an enduring and crucial hostility in John Williams’s modestly profound tragedy, Stoner.

  1954 Following an invitation from a young employee at the Guinness Park Royal Brewery, who had known them as fellow runners at Oxford, Norris and Ross McWhirter, the proprietors of McWhirter Twins Ltd., a London fact-gathering agency, met Sir Hugh Beaver, the Guinness managing director, for lunch at the brewery. Sir Hugh had an idea, inspired by a debate with fellow sportsmen whether the golden plover was the fastest game bird in Europe: create a book of superlatives to answer the idle questions that pop up in pubs every day. Hired immediately for their “quirkish minds,” the McWhirters spent a frantic year of research and by the next fall produced the first Guinness Book of Records, 198 pages in a special “beer-proof” binding.

  September 13

  BORN: 1916 Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach), Llandaff, Wales

  1920 Else Holmelund Minarik (Father Bear Comes Home), Denmark

  DIED: 1592 Michel de Montaigne (Essays), 59, Château de Montaigne, France

  1928 Italo Svevo (Zeno’s Conscience), 66, Motta di Livenza, Italy

  NO YEAR The “sands,” in Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands, are not in the desert but in the shallows around the northern coastal islands of Germany. And the “riddle” is why a solo yachtsman named Davies, cruising his way innocently along the coast in search of ducks, was directed on this day by a fellow sailor into those treacherous shallows, where only luck saved his boat from being blown to pieces in a gale. The riddle’s solution, Davies and his friend Carruthers discover on a return to the same coast, has to do with what is hiding among those coastal islands, an answer that would prove surprisingly influential as The Riddle of the Sands, after its release in 1903, became not only a template for the modern spy thriller but, read by Churchill and others, a major influence on the British military buildup for the First World War.

  1939 His stove has reverted to an old gas-burner model that smells like burned grease. His refrigerator has become an obsolete, belt-driven monster. His TV set is now an AM radio in a wood cabinet, and his polyphonic audio set a Victrola playing a 78 of Ray Noble’s “Turkish Delight.” And his homeopape machine? That’s just gone. Ubik, Philip K. Dick�
��s reality-bending masterpiece, is set in the near-future of 1992, but suddenly all the modern conveniences in Joe Chip’s conapt have deteriorated decades into the past, and time itself seems to have shifted back to this date. The only thing left for Joe to do is meet with the other employees of Runciter Associates and figure out how they’ve ended up in this half-life where time is slipping away from them. Was their founder, Glen Runciter, really killed in that moon explosion, or were they? And how can they get their hands on an aerosol can of that time-fixing Ubik spray they keep hearing about?

  1940 The Nazi occupation of France didn’t extend to the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, so in the days after the invasion its foreign consulates were besieged with those looking to flee into exile, including the novelists Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, German émigrés whose opposition to the Nazis had put them atop a Gestapo execution list. Finally, on a Friday the 13th that Werfel worried was bad luck, Mann (nearly seventy), Werfel, and their wives, Nelly Mann and Alma Mahler Werfel (widow of the composer Gustav Mahler), made a dramatic mountain climb on goat paths through the Pyrenees with the help of the clandestine American Rescue Committee and escaped to a friendly welcome in Spain. Within a month they had arrived by ship at Hoboken, New Jersey.

  September 14

  BORN: 1930 Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind), Indianapolis